High on life

Morphine stay the indie course with Like Swimming

by Amy Finch

Morphine's low-tech saxy sway got perfected with zilch help from any honchos, so it's kind of funny to find the band on Dreamworks, the record-label part of the Geffen/Spielberg conglomerate SKG. But there'll be plenty of time to get used to the concept. Like Swimming, Morphine's fourth disc, due in October (or later), comes out on Rykodisc, as will the fifth. So it might be more than a year before the band actually make their Dreamworks debut. In the meantime, Morphine do the summer al fresco thing, from Seattle to Holland, with a stop at the Hatch Shell next Friday as part of WFNX's New Music Series. (They Might Be Giants and the Cardigans are also on the bill.)

On the surface, the link from Morphine's dusky suavity to the planet's most commercial film director may seem farfetched. But Morphine's music has an easy fluidity that could appeal to a wide range of palates. The trio are masters of mood, playing with a cinematic richness that evokes Edward Hopper, nighthawks on barstools and in bedrooms -- isolated, static, unfulfilled. Or to be less abstract and hifalutin, if you've seen the film Spanking the Monkey, you know that Morphine's music can be a devastating soundtrack for a young life gone to hell. The simple bass-sax-drums do much to convey claustrophobia and doom, but the most haunting image in Spanking the Monkey comes at the end, when the thwarted spanker walks away from the mess of his life to the mandolin-driven "In Spite of Me" (compliments of Blood Orange Jimmy Ryan). The lovely, sad song communicates a resilience perfect for the moment.

That resilience is mirrored in Morphine singer/founder Mark Sandman's own career as well. Five years ago, when I last spoke to him, Treat Her Right, his old band, had been dumped by their label, RCA, and Sandman was left with humble ambitions. The band were happy just to play, he said. Treat Her Right fizzled soon thereafter, but Sandman then assembled Morphine, who now include Treat Her Right's drummer Billy Conway and saxist Dana Colley.

One of the problems with Treat Her Right, according to Sandman, was clutter and mismanagement on the business end. "We never used to pay the band in Treat Her Right," he laughs. "We always thought we'd make money down the road someday. We were paying our crew more than we were paying ourselves."

Presumably Dreamworks will make sure that the guys in Morphine don't starve to death. It's a model set-up for Morphine, particularly given Sandman's interest in making music for film. What he seems happiest with is that though Dreamworks couldn't have bigger backing, it's special "because they're keeping it small and they've gone out and attracted some really great business talent. Actually, the record part is owned by all the guys that used to run Warners for years. And they just have a really good attitude. They've got tons of connections, obviously. Especially for movies."

Sandman has already done some film-score writing, for Whiskey Down, a straight-to-video movie with Virginia Madsen, John Lurie, and Flea. It's not available yet; Sandman describes it as an O. Henry-type story set in an all-night diner in New York and involving a winning lottery ticket, a couple of corpses, and some cops who keep coming in for free coffee and pie. It's the first feature of Gary Auerbach, a producer/director who, Sandman says, "mostly works in TV. Weird things. He invented that MTV dating show. That was his day job, coming up with things like that."

Morphine's edgy, urbane sound ought to lend the proceedings a fair degree of Nighthawks shadows. For the scoring, Auerbach had Sandman watch the movie, told him what parts he wanted music for, and what sort of music. "I had to record some rough ideas and send it to him. He'd check it out and make comments, and we'd go back and forth like that."

A gradated approach to recording is also how Morphine put together their upcoming disc. Whereas they approached last year's Yes (Rykodisc) as "more of a live album," on Like Swimming the band spent more time with the mixing process. Which did not preclude goofing around.

"We got the girls from the office at Fort Apache to sing back-up on one song. `French fries with pepper.' That was all they had to sing. And we got our manager [Deb Klein] to sing on that too. She happened to be there. So we have a very special choir on that song."

Cheers to idiosyncrasy in the face of megawatt big business.

Morphine, They Might Be Giants, and the Cardigans play a free WFNX/Boston Phoenix-sponsored back-to-school concert at the Esplanade's Hatch Shell next Friday, September 6, at 5:30 p.m.